For most of man’s existence on Earth, the universe has been anything but benevolent. Famines, floods, and earthquakes have destroyed whole populations. The plague ravaged Europe during the Middle Ages. Even in the nineteenth century, two out of three people died as children. On the frontier, starvation was not that uncommon after a long winter or a drought.And these horrors do not even begin to take account of man’s inhumanity to man.What is my point? That for most of man’s existence, he has had only a tenuous power over his life, physically and politically. Life was full of uncertainties and anxieties, which helped to give rise to religions promising happiness in this life or an afterlife. Religion gave people a much-needed sense of hope.

Power versus a Sense of Power

That largely unchanging situation underwent a revolution after the Renaissance. The rediscovery of the power of reason and the development of technology enabled men to bring about a vast expansion in their power over their lives, and they came to expect that the future would see still further increases. And, in fact that is what happened. In the twentieth century, medical technology lengthened the average life-span from four decades to seven. Today, in the free world, men are able to control much of the impact of natural disasters. From an economic and technological perspective, no one in a capitalist society need go hungry.At the same time, however, the Enlightenment took away religion’s assurance that a benevolent force would look over men in times of helplessness and hopelessness and would compensate them hereafter for their sufferings. We became responsible for our own happiness

What can we do to sustain a rational optimism?

And what has been the upshot? Evidence indicates that for many, man’s increase in power has not brought a sense of efficacy. If we consider those women born before World War I, those born around 1925, and those born in the Fifties (the Baby Boomers), we find that there is a quadrupling in depression from the first group to the second, and a doubling from the second to the third. Why should this be, if people have continued to acquire more control than ever over their lives in the twentieth century?

One reason, I suspect, is the nihilism of modern philosophy: the lack of answers about the meaning of life and human purposes; the moral relativity that says it doesn’t matter what you do; the draining away of the sense that human beings are capable and worthy. I think these ideas have infiltrated the culture to such an extent that they are affecting the psychological outlook of a lot of people. In this respect, you may personally have experienced Ayn Rand‘s ideas as a great antidote. Rand tell us that life has meaning and purpose and that living as a human being can be a noble activity. Through the story of The Fountainhead, Rand gives us one long argument against Dominique’s belief in the triumph of power-lust and toadyism over the true, the rational, and the beautiful.

Learned Optimism

Rand’s ideas, such as the efficacy of reason and the successful nature of life, certainly help us to be hopeful about our lives. But is there a specific technology of the soul that can increase our hopefulness and thus our motivation and our success? If so, how can we implement it in our daily lives? Are there specific psychological processes that we can adopt? Are there methods we can apply? And are there ways we can make those methods more permanent in our minds? I think there are, and I think the research of psychologist Martin Seligman, at University of Pennsylvania, helps provide some of that technology.

Seligman did some interesting experiments back in the seventies on what he called “learned helplessness.” He worked with two sets of dogs. One he put in a cage that they could not get out of. The other he put in a cage that they could jump out of. And then he shocked both of these sets of dogs. The ones that could escape their cages did so, and got away from the shocks. The ones that could do nothing to escape the shock became passive; after a while, they just lay down and took it.

You cannot directly change your emotions but you can change what you pay attention to.

Then, when he took the dogs who could not escape the shock in the first experiment and put them in a cage where they could get away from the shock, they still did nothing. And when he tried to teach them to get out of the cage, he had to spend a lot of time showing them they could escape. To be accurate, there were always some dogs who did hardly anything once they found themselves trapped, and there were some dogs who had been trapped but quickly learned later to escape. But the results I am talking about were averages.Seligman was fascinated with these results, because he thought the dogs had learned to be helpless, and a sense of helplessness is a key component of depression. So he asked if he could “immunize” dogs from this learned helplessness. He took a group of dogs and let them hear a tone before the shock went off. And he gave these dogs the opportunity to jump out of the cage when they heard the tone. The fascinating result was: these dogs never became passive. When they were put in a cage from which they could not escape, they never stopped trying, and they escaped immediately when they could.

Why? They had acquired a sense of efficacy with regard to the shocks.

Seligman thought this was an interesting model to apply to human beings because of the common feeling in depression that there is nothing that can be done that will make a difference. So, he asked: Could humans likewise be immunized against feelings of helplessness and hopelessness? To test this, Seligman put human beings in situations similar to that of the dogs: The subjects would get shocked, but some did not have control over it and some did. Fascinatingly, he found that some people always tried to get control and some did not. Seligman posited that the difference lay in the way the people explained the cause of their failure: whether they blamed it on themselves or on circumstances.

Explanatory Styles

Out of this, Seligman developed a theory of explanatory styles. According to this theory, there are three dimensions to an explanatory style: the permanence with which you think a cause exists; the pervasiveness of the cause, in other words, how universally true or how limited it is; and whether the cause lies within you or outside. Seligman argues that these explanatory styles give rise to what we conventionally call optimists and pessimists. And he has developed an Attributional Style Questionnaire by which to test people. You can see more information about explanatory styles here.

In terms of the dimensions of these styles, I think the character of Howard Roark from The Fountainhead is a model of the optimistic attributional style. He does not believe that evil is permanent. He does believe that there are people he can reach by persuasion and by demonstrating what is good in his buildings. And he certainly does not think that failure is his fault.

You can pay attention to your possibilities. You can take an entrepreneurial attitude towards your life.

But I would like to examine one other aspect of the research in relation to the psychology of hope. In some experiments, people rated optimists and pessimists have been given tests in which they sometimes are and sometimes are not in control of an event, such as a light’s turning on. Pessimists, and depressed people in particular, tend to have a very accurate sense about whether they are actually in control. Optimists, however, consistently overrate their control. If the light does not turn on, they have some explanation for it; if the light does turn on, they think they did it. This suggests that optimists, if they are going to be rational optimists, must guard against a temperamental disposition to over-optimism.

On the other hand, I believe there is clearly a sense in which pessimists are also unrealistic. They may make accurate judgments about when they do and do not have control over an event, but I believe they make inaccurate judgments about when they could and could not get control over an uncontrolled event, because of their belief that their helplessness is permanent, pervasive, and personal. Unfortunately, I do not know of any laboratory experiments that have attempted to test this hypothesis.

The Real and the Possible

This brings me to the heart of my lecture. What can we do to sustain a rational optimism?

I think that fundamentally there is one important fact that offers us two keys. The important fact is that you cannot directly change your emotions but you can change what you pay attention to, at least to a large extent. This enables you to make yourself more alert for opportunity.

Thus, the first key is: You can carefully focus on the facts about your situation and yourself. Is this the way things have to be or is it just the way they happen to be? Is this the way of the world or just the way things are in my immediate surroundings?

The second key is: You can pay attention to your possibilities. Is this something you can change or not? You can take an entrepreneurial attitude towards your life.

Do not accept impossibility without overwhelming evidence.

To me, these are the two elements involved in having a habit of hope. Make it your habit to pay attention to exactly what is the case and what is not; what is good in your life and what is not. And make it a habit to ask: What are my possibilities? Be especially alert to whether there are possibilities for change which you failed to see before.

People can have a lot of limitations when it comes to what we would consider leading a normal life and yet have a very hopeful attitude. That has to do with what they are paying attention to. Are they looking at what they cannot do or at what they can do? Are they looking at what they do not control or at what they do control? In this respect, I think that success is: functioning up to your fullest capacity and being alert to all the facts and possibilities within your personal context. This means recognizing the barriers to your control: Are you a healthy human being or not? Are you living in a relatively free society or a relatively unfree society? In judging your success, you need to take these contexts into account.

To be sure, the conditions of success can be very complex. It is often hard to know what is possible, both positively and negatively. And this is one of the things that optimists and pessimists disagree about the most: the realm of the possible. The optimist says “I’m going to keep looking. I’ve got this idea and I think I can do it.” The pessimist has a million reasons why something isn’t going to work.

To say that is not to declare that the optimistic attitude is always the right one. As much as we want to have control and want to know that we can do things, it may be that we do not know-after all, we cannot know everything. But we can turn that truth around and make it an optimistic statement: “Well, yeah, I don’t know everything and I don’t know for sure I can do it. But I don’t know for sure that I can’t do it. And I know for sure that if I don’t try, nothing’s going to happen.”

Ten Habits of Hope

Following are some suggestions to help you develop a habit of hope:

1. Check your generalizations about the world for an “explanatory style” that is pessimistic, or unjustifiably optimistic.

2. Remember that, ultimately, you are in control of how you act.

3. When trying to determine a course of action, ask: What is the range of the possible? This is the most difficult judgment to make, especially when one is attempting something new. If the range is too restricted by one’s conception of the world, your hopes will be too few and too small, and your imagination and motivation curtailed: you won’t adequately explore the possible. If the range is too unrestricted by facts and reason, your hopes will be impossible and time will be wasted.

4. Do not accept impossibility without overwhelming evidence. For many, many situations, we do not and cannot have complete certainty about the outcome. But that alone is not reason to give up on a course of action. Develop a habit of looking for alternative means of achieving your goals.

5. Be alert to when you do not have control over external events, so that you can think of ways to get control.

6. Once you have a specific goal, identify obstacles to your success and the possibilities of overcoming them. Ask: What is the adversity here? What are my premises? Are they true? Am I making a pessimistic judgment or an unjustifiably optimistic judgment? Do not rule out a judgment just because it sounds pessimistic. Remember that you want to be “rationally optimistic,” not Pollyana-ish.

7. If you find yourself giving up, ask: What is my reason? Am I sure it is a good reason?

8. But ask about the chances of failure, too: What would be the true cost of failure? Can I bear it? Be sure to ask these questions early, before you have invested too much emotion in success.

9. De-catastrophize. Learn to judge the facts of your situation precisely and to take into account the available alternatives rather than leaping to the conclusion that all is lost.

10. Stop ruminating. If you fail, sit down purposefully and learn the lessons of the failure. Decide how to do things better. Then put the failure behind you.

Free Enterprise educators are urged to examine their educational principles and align their classroom practice with their advocacy of liberty by providing a classroom environment that develops the virtues as well as the ideas needed to live in liberty. Such pedagogy has a direct benefit to the educator. When freedom and autonomy are directly experienced, students become more engaged, interested, and enthusiastic learners and more often adopt the ideas and values of liberty. Combining empirical evidence from Socratic practice and Montessori education with research on development and optimal learning, the authors suggest ways to create such a classroom culture.

“To consider the school as the place where instruction is given is one point of view. But to consider the school as a preparation for life is another. In the latter case, the school
must satisfy all the needs of life. ”Maria Montessori (1994, p. 5)

I. Schooling Versus Autonomy

When we think of free societies, we often think of industry, free markets and minimal government. But real freedom starts within, with self-understanding, self-responsibility, self-direction, determination, and a nimble ability to adapt to life’s challenges.

If young people are schooled in the facts about the overwhelming advantages of a free society, and how to reason well about them, and they study the full range of great ideas, the likelihood that they will be convinced of the ideas underpinning a free society goes up greatly because the facts are on the side of freedom.

Yet, it’s one thing to be lectured to about liberty and the virtues needed for it; it’s another to know how to act in freedom. It’s valuable to know the ideas of liberty, but can you apply them in your life? Where do you learn how? As Aristotle said: “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” (Book II, Chapter 1)

It’s one thing to believe in the ideas abstractly; it’s another to experience what such a society would be like—and to be motivated to achieve it.

To build a free world, we need people at many levels of society and in many areas—

business, the trades, the arts, medicine, journalists, as well as intellectuals and professors—with the ideas, values, and habits friendly to liberty. This is where a sound, liberal education is essential.

With history as the measure, it’s clear that free society advocates don’t need to be a majority to significantly change the culture. But they need to be a significant, knowledgeable, and active minority. Such a minority made the progress towards full freedom and individual rights possible in Britain; such a minority in the American Colonies was instrumental in achieving independence from Britain.

Unlike the American Colonists, none of us has been raised in a highly self-reliant society of the Enlightenment Era—did we have the chance to develop the habits needed to embody its values? To act in our families, among our friends, in our towns and cities, the way a free person should act? To have the skills and force of personality to implement the changes needed to make our lives better and freer, whatever our professions, associations and interests?

Educators familiar with the facts, history, and ideas of free societies and spontaneous order understand the value of dispersed and localized knowledge and the prosperity and flourishing that results from individuals peacefully collaborating as trading partners.

What they might not have considered is the way in which the classroom is a micro-society in which students learn how to behave in the larger world and whether their classrooms reflect the social relationships, the virtues, and the psychological conditions that sustain and advance the behavior of free people. Educators have the opportunity to craft an experience in which students learn how to behave as self-reliant, independent, self-responsible individuals.

The modern classroom, from grade school to graduate school, relies heavily on a structure of a single arbiter of knowledge, often in the position of lecturer, discussion leader, knowledge authority, and director of learning. Directed group lessons in traditional grade school and lectures in higher education are favored methodologies of the traditional method of education.

The teaching paradigm encourages an authority to convey the “right” answers to the waiting student-receptacles. Yet, this top-down environment is counter-productive to conveying the ideas, values, and virtues of a free society.

In the traditional teaching model, students are considered passive empty vessels, to be filled with knowledge by the academic authority, rather than active agents in their own learning.

This model is a legacy of the movement to economically mass-educate the populace and is literally based on factory organization, i.e. everyone doing the same thing at the same time for mass production.

How is a young person supposed to learn to be an autonomous individual if he or she is being treated like an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge? What opportunities are students give to learn and practice the skills of a self-reliant, independent, and self-responsible individual?

If we are aiming to foster a society driven by free enterprise, shouldn’t the pedagogy of our classrooms align with those values?

Traditionally, “learning” is measured by the amount of information the instructor has offered which the student is able to reiterate on tests and in papers. How does the instructor know if real understanding has been achieved? Whether the student has deeply incorporated the instructor’s information and ideas into his or her thinking? Whether the student can use this information in his or her life?

Consider the psychological effects of the traditional methods of teaching in which:

The teacher is the repository of truth.

The student is taught one line of reasoning given in the lecture or presentation.

The student is the receiver, not initiator of learning.

In this paradigm:

How does the student learn how to arrive at truth himself?

How does the student learn that there are multiple ways of approaching a problem?

How does the student learn to find subjects of interest to himself, individually, and know how to go about the process of learning new material?

If students have no skills in these processes, how can they grow into autonomous individuals, arriving at their own conclusions and navigating all the choices and opportunities which freedom presents?

“‘Autonomy’ suggests, strictly speaking, that one gives or has given laws to oneself; that one is self-governing; that in essentials one obeys one’s own imperatives.” (Kaufmann, 1980,15).

The conditions of freedom cannot be consistently and sufficiently conveyed in a traditional, lecture-based environment because it does not provide the individual with opportunities to learn how to be a free, autonomous person.

Advocates of reason and freedom understand that the mind cannot be forced to accept truth. Nor does the social pressure of authority or peers result in a real understanding of truth, and certainly not the first-hand comprehension and autonomy of the innovator. Neither does a top-down environment cultivate an independent person’s ability to fight for his or her individual freedom.

To acquire truth, each person must observe and reflect on facts for him- or herself. Each person must compare and contrast, analyze and synthesize those facts, for him- or herself. Each person develops ideas, from those facts within him- or herself. Each person must integrate one set of facts with another, one set of ideas with another, for him- or herself. This is the only way to arrive at truth, since an understanding of truth cannot be transferred directly from one mind to another.

If a classroom structure can serve as the sandbox in which to practice how to live as a free person, then the independence of rational inquiry and the development of rational judgment, need to be incorporated into that sandbox.

Advocates of a free society understand the value and power of the dispersed and localized knowledge of the individual within the structure of a market, the creativity it unleashes and the flourishing that results. In turn, the micro-society of a classroom structure that endeavors to encourage the exchange of ideas between individuals, while still incorporating the guidance and expertise of the educator, mirrors the creative process of the market. This is impossible in a strictly lecture structure, and difficult in many discussion structures.

Free society educators can endeavor to construct a classroom structure parallel to a market with a productive exchange of ideas between individuals, while still incorporating the guidance and expertise of the educator.

Such a classroom offers the student the opportunity to develop and practice the skills of rational independence, creative thinking, collaborative exchange, honesty, objectivity, justice, and honor—all skills and virtues valuable and necessary in a free society.

II. The Principled Pedagogy of Freedom

“The greatest [obstacle for] an attempt to give freedom to the child and to bring its powers to light does not lie in finding a form of education which realizes these aims. It lies rather in overcoming the prejudices which the adult has formed in this regard.”

Maria Montessori (1955, p.48)

Developmental and cognitive research, plus over 100 years of experience using the Montessori philosophy of education argues that optimal learning occurs through freedom within a structured environment, where the following conditions are present (Lillard, 2005, passim):

The instructor is informed about and alert to the developmental needs of the young adult student,

Questions are actively encouraged by classroom methodology,

Instructor’s activities are modified based on the interests of the students, within the limits of the studied material,

Activities are crafted with optimal learning conditions in mind, ones that engage the needs, attentions, and interests of young adults.

Methodologies rooted in the Montessori educational philosophy encourage individualism and self-reliance, foster individual development, unfettered creative discovery, exploration, and integration of newideas. In support of this claim, researchers have recently identified the unusual number of highly creative people who were Montessori students (Sims, 2011).

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, French cooking evangelist Julia Child, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are among the many unusually creative and capable people with a Montessori background. Some insist this type of education was instrumental in their radical creativity.

For example, Brin and Page have identified the individually-driven exploration of the Montessori classrooms as a major source of their willingness to try new things and think out of the box again and again. (Goodwin, 2012)

The environment created in a Montessori classroom relates to the well-known facts of spontaneous order: The discovery of truth, the correct identification of life-supporting facts, is not a centralized, top-down procedure. Instead, it results from a complex process of discovery and argument, demonstrated through the history of thought and the progress of civilization.

Socratic practice, short lesson-lectures and self-selected research projects are examples of classroom strategies for higher education which encourage individual autonomy and contribute to fostering attitudes that are receptive to the complex ideas of freedom.

III. Specialized Discussion Methods and Individualism

“Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.” Maria Montessori (1912, p. 86)

The classroom is a micro-society in which the social order emerges through the exchange of ideas and values, explicit and implicit, and from the way in which participants interact with each other according to the discussion principles.

The term “Socratic Seminar” is used variously. We are using it here to mean a very particular discussion format and methodology in which students are engaged in examining, analyzing, and discussing the material themselves, first-hand. They are synthesizing the information themselves, rather than having it handed to them. It is an active learning environment. Michael Strong’s book, The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice well describes this particular methodology and its benefits.

Socratic Practice harnesses important and powerful social-psychological elements that encourage a freedom-oriented classroom culture while increasing learning. It is a process of collaborative inquiry which develops fact-based reasoning, objectivity, listening skills, and team work for problem-solving.

Seminars run by the principles of Socratic Practice function as a market of ideas, where reason, combined with the invisible hand of individual self-interest, results in greater knowledge, reasoning, and social skills for all. As a collaborative learning experience, it taps into all the advantages of learning by imitation; it’s an opportunity to see multiple ways to reason on the same materials. Research by the Jasper Project on Cognition and Learning at Vanderbilt University shows meaningful group problem-solving results in superior learning (Jasper Project, 2000).

“One particular thing that I learned at Queen’s [College]—both from faculty and students—was how to work collaboratively with smart people and make use of the Socratic method to achieve commonality of purpose.” Billionaire founder of Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors, Elon Musk

This method requires each participant to focus on what exactly is said in the text, and what can be surmised from it; the instructor guides the discussion with incisive questions and by requiring the participants to stick to the facts of the work when arguing their opinions.

All opinions must be grounded by reference to the work studied, developing the habit of fact-based judgment and objectivity.

The teacher acts as a facilitator, encouraging the students to use their own minds to find the meaning of the text; the teacher does not act as an authority on the text. The best reasoning is the highest authority.

The teacher demonstrates and encourages questions and thinking in different ways when approaching the material. The points of view and questions of the different participants demonstrate how material can be approached in a variety of ways. This outcome encourages creativity by illustrating many ways to reason about the same issue. Consequently, not only excellent deductive reasoning, but creative, inductive reasoning is encouraged.

Participants effectively trade their knowledge and skills by example.

These elements work together to strengthen student reasoning skills and instantiate the value of individual differences. Displays of inordinate knowledge about a subject are irrelevant and discouraged because each discussion member cannot verify them. This reduces non-productive jostling for social position. Reason’s authority is the great equalizer and students come to appreciate each other as helpers in their learning. This results in a psychologically safe environment, which encourages exploration and creativity.

At the end of every Socratic seminar, the instructor guides a “debrief,” a self-reflective discussion in which each participant comments on what went well and what could be improved. The beneficial effects are:

Significant improvement in the discussions from one session to the next by raising conscious awareness about participant actions and interactions,

Participants learn to be equally responsible for the quality of the inquiry,

A culture of equality among peers is established, including the instructor; the instructor and other participants values each individual’s thoughts and reactions, while the best reasoning remains the highest authority; Mastery Learning research on how individuals acquire mastery in knowledge and skills found that the attitude of the teacher seriously affects the students self-image and motivation, (Dweck, 1999, passim),

The validation of the person of each individual because each person’s participation with rational arguments adds value for the other participants,

The encouragement of the habit of taking responsibility, giving validation to the virtues of others, and working together in a rational way.

The discussions improve radically from one session to another because of the awareness generated by the debrief, and the expectation of achievement and cooperation. These methods benefit from the strengths of peer-learning and exchange (Brown, et al., 1989, Orr, 1987).

In Socratic Practice, the teacher uses his or her expertise to craft the entire environment of the class:

Physical:

Every participant sits in a circle facing all the others as equal intellectual explorers.

The room is well-lit and comfortable to enhance concentration.

No phones or outside distractions are allowed.

Cognitive:

Works are chosen and taught in a purposeful order, so that students can discover their meaning and connections themselves and find joy in doing so. They are invited to engage with the material rather than passively receive it.

Focus is on paying attention to the deepest meaning of the works studied and each other through questions of clarification, i.e. what does the other person mean?

Solid evidence and reasoning are required for all opinions.

Social:

The instructor takes a limited role and gives feedback in a way that is kind, but honest, encouraging student awareness of each other, and cooperation through self-moderated exchange.

Students are encouraged and enlightened as to how to respectfully listen by the instructor’s sincere attempts to hear and understand what the other is saying, before replying.

Students are responsible for their own contributions and encourage contributions from others.

Psychological:

Reflection at the end of the discussion about what went well in the discussion and what can be improved generates a high level of self-awareness and self-generated improvement in learning from session to session.

Csikszentmihalyi’s research on Flow, the psychology of optimal experience, shows that attention is the most limited cognitive resource (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991). But it’s husbanded very well in this type of seminar.

Every person’s reasoned contribution is valued; being active makes it easier to pay attention,

The specially selected texts are of deep interest about issues of importance; this makes it highly motivating to pay attention to the discussion.

These skills are enormously practical: a 2014 study by Association of American Colleges and Universities and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems analyzing Census Bureau data of 3 million U.S. residents found “the overwhelming majority of employers are desperate to hire graduates who have a demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems.” (Samuelson, 2014)

Lastly, students report that these seminars require the best of them; their best thinking, behavior, and awareness of others.

“You see how much value you have to offer and to add to your own thinking. It’s not a zero sum game like in traditional education where you’re trying to compete with each other and there’s one answer. It’s not “the right answer”; it’s better and better answers. Everyone’s building a mosaic of truth together. We all study one text but there many objective truths in it, you’re benefiting from hearing all these different ways to understand things objectively and truly. And you realize you have something to contribute. It doesn’t have to be the perfect thing, but together it fits with what other people are saying.” – Michael Natividad, junior, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

IV. Conclusion

“Be careful not to ask [your] questions of the [students]. Only when [students] seek to answer questions which they themselves ask, do they commit themselves to the hard work of finding answers that are meaningful to them…give only as much guidance and encouragement as is necessary to elicit the [students’] interest.” Maria Montessori (1937, p. 26)

“Comparing this method to the regular educational system, this unavoidable feeling of frustration comes up: Why, with such a fantastic method, isn’t there a change? The passion in learning that everybody had is proof of this seminar’s effectiveness.” Tobias Mihura, junior, Clarin High School, Buenos Aires

The authors are sure they have not communicated all the ways in which teachers of free enterprise can encourage the values of a free society in the classroom micro-society. We welcome suggestions and wish to learn from the skills of others. But we urge such teachers to reflect on what kind of habits they are encouraging in their students. We hope that we have triggered reflection on how to develop the virtues needed for freedom.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. January, 2014. “Liberal Arts Graduates and Employment: Setting the Record Straight.” http://www.aacu.org/leap/documents/nchems.pdf

Acknowledgements

Ms. Enright would like to thank Rachel Davison for initiating the idea of the presentation leading to this paper as well as for her lovely work on the presentation, and K.R. for his encouragement and help with the ideas and vision.

Originally published at the conference site of the Association of Private Enterprise Educators. http://www.etnpconferences.net/apee/apee2014/User/Program.php?TimeSlot=12

In the following, I plan to summarize the essence of Binswanger’s argument on goal-causation, and then expand on the issues he brings up and discuss any problems or objections I have with his arguments. Time has not permitted me to be as complete and persuasive in my objections as I might like – I only hope to stimulate discussion of the issues.

In this chapter, Binswanger outlines his theory of how non- conscious actions can be teleologically caused. He defines an action as teleological when the goal causes the action for the sake of achieving the goal. This is what he calls “goal- causation.”

The fundamental question is: how can non-conscious action, i.e. vegetative action, occur for the sake of a condition – the goal – which exists later in time than the action?; without consciousness, by what means does the action move toward the goal?

Purposeful action of conscious beings is Binswanger’s paradigm case for teleological action. Binswanger thinks that, ontologically, our idea of teleological action derives from our direct introspective experience. We know that we can imagine an end or value, desire it and put in motion the actions to obtain it. In purposeful action, the awareness of a desire or value causes the agent to undertake the action towards the goal. This is how a future condition can motivate a present action.

Vegetative action has no awareness of values by which to cause it, therefore, how is the benefit of the goal a cause of the action, by what means is the value of a future state causing present action?

Once again, Binswanger looks to purposeful action to get his cue in regard to the vegetative: he claims that all purposeful action is based on past experience, whether it be memories or perceptions, ideas, imaginings or associations. Men imagine the future by recalling past experiences, valuable objects and conditions achieved, and projecting them as occurring again, although perhaps rearranged somewhat.

Likewise, he claims that current vegetative action is entirely dependent on the forms and organization of the organism already in place, as a result of previous value- seeking activity of the organism or its ancestors. Binswanger claims there are three elements, or proximate causes, to any vegetative action: the fuel which allows the action to be self-generated; the “directive mechanism” which controls the utilization of that fuel; and the triggering stimulus which initiates the use of the fuel.

“On the vegetative level, the stimulus is able to trigger the action because of the way the mechanism for the action is organized. The mechanism has certain _terms of operation_ dictated by the nature of its directive mechanism(s). The way in which the mechanism is organized determines what will or will not trigger its behavior.” (p. 81)

According to Binswanger, the _ultimate_ cause of vegetative action is that which causes the fuel and the directive mechanism to exist, thereby enabling the organism to take the action. The ultimate cause is the explanation for the proximate causes. In Binswanger’s view, there is no means and therefore no possibility for a traditionally conceived final cause to draw the organism’s action to the future in vegetative action; in reality, the final cause must be a different kind of efficient cause.

He proposes that, for any vegetative action, the value- significance of _past_ goals, which has shaped and determined the nature of the fuel used, the directive mechanisms and the response to triggers, is the goal towards which present action is aimed. Just as past conscious experience serves to motivate the goal-seeking behavior of humans, so past vegetative experience determines the goal-seeking activity of vegetative action.

“Putting all these points together, we can say that a vegetative action will qualify as telelogical if it can be shown to be a self-generated action caused by a mechanism whose existence, organization, fuel, and terms of operation result from the survival benefit that past instances of the goal have provided the organism in similar previous circumstances.” (p. 88).

Put in simpler terms, Binswanger’s argument becomes: organisms act like they do because that’s what they did before. In his view, organisms are not pursuing current goals for their own sake, but because they are similar to past goals, and because pursuing such goals has worked in the past.

I don’t think so.

According to Binswanger, a current vegetative action is goal- directed because the organism took this action before – _somehow_ – and the action resulted in a value for the organism. Once taken, the action became an individual or evolutionary habit, and we can call the organism’s actions _goal-directed_ because it is aimed at the past goal.

The organism and its descendents may have been “smart” enough to learn from their actions – but how did the first organism manage to take those actions the first time? Was it completely random, an accident, or what? Does he mean to imply that the whole history of life is one long series of felicitous accidents?

While I appreciate the problem which Binswanger is addressing, viz., how can a non-conscious organism be moved by the future, I find that his theory does not sit well with my knowledge of the nature of living things. What is distinctive about life as opposed to the actions of inanimate matter? It’s _goal-directedness_ – “a process of self- maintained and self-generated action” – it acts to maintain its existence – the goal of its actions is the perpetuation of life. And the essence of my difficulty lies in what I know to be the enormous creative power of life to fulfill that goal. His theory gives no explanation, other than the usual suggestions of accident or chance, as to how _new_ adaptive actions arise. Without the answer to that question, I don’t think Binswanger has solved the “problem” of vegetative action.

The history of life is the history of ever-changing forms, new ways of fulfilling life’s goal of self-perpetuation. Its history is replete with the coming into existence of new forms, new characteristics, new abilities. Certainly, like the knowledge of a conscious being, these are not created _ex nihilo_, i.e. there must be some relationship between the new forms and abilities and the old ones. But, the mere repetition of old forms of action is _not_ an adequate description of living action.

Ultimately, I believe Binswanger takes a too-reductionistic approach to biology, as he takes a too-behavioristic view of psychology. For example, he says “A dog’s desire for an affectionate pat from its master is a consequence of its memory of similar past instances of affection.” (p. 77)

These statements imply an associationist view of dog action. Surely, once the dog has received and enjoyed pats, the memory serves as motivation. But, for one thing, his explanation gives no consideration as to why the dog sought pats _in the first place_. And yet, anyone who has observed animals knows that they initiate all kinds of actions – they seek, they explore, they try things out long before they know what the consequences will be. Purposeful behavior can be self-initiated in a way that doesn’t necessarily depend _solely_ on past experience, either personal or evolutionary.

And in his discussion of proximate causes, he frequently uses the word “mechanism” to describe living action. I think this use, and in general the mechanist approach to living action, is unfortunate. Machines operate automatically to achieve ends set by men. Generally, they act in a straight line to their ends, very unlike the behavior of life.

Organic behavior is characterized by its variability in the face of obstacles, in order to reach its goals. A plant will grow in one direction, and then another and another in its attempts to go around a rock and reach the sun. Ludwig Von Bertalaanfy, who wrote extensively on general systems theory, called this characteristic the “equifinality” of living action: the means vary, the end remains the same.

In fact, exploration of conscious beings is like the multiple attempts of vegetative organisms to reach goals. The constant in the actions is the attempt on the part of the organism to fulfill its needs; its pursuit of values.

Binswanger only touches on the issue of creativity in his comments on purposeful behaviour: “In the case of novel goals conceived by human beings, the cause of the goal-idea is to be found in the psychological effects of the previously perceived constituents of the novel goal.” (p. 79) Note how, in this explanation, he avoids the problem of the generation of the new, by his hand-waving phrase “psychological effects,” and how he attributes the creation of the novel to previous perception alone. While creative thinking is certainly _dependent_ on previous experience, that alone does not account for it. Internally generated needs and values play just as important a role in the existence of creative ideas.

Let’s look back at the nature of conscious action to see if we can understand how vegetative action operates. When an animal is born, it has an internally generated set of needs, and of actions it can take to fulfill those needs. It moves and acts in attempts to fulfill its needs. Often, the more intelligent animals try all kinds of things without apparent ends in mind, but with, apparently, the need to find out about the world in order to learn how to live in it – they explore. During their explorations, they discover that certain actions cause certain desirable, need-fulfilling results – like getting a pat on the head from their master. Consequently, they repeat these actions because they now know that they will have valuable results.

In my analysis of this sequence, the animal’s original actions were _not_ random or accidental in origin or _intent_ – they were taken for the purpose of finding out how some need could be fulfilled. The exploratory actions were quite goal-oriented, that is, to the _internal_ goal of fulfilling a need of the organism. Once the animal discovered by what means it could fulfill that need, it learned to take that series of actions again – it’s apparent goal became the pat on the head. But, ultimately, it’s goal still remains the fulfillment of its needs – in the process of self-maintenance and self-generation.

This applies in a parallel manner to vegetative action. The organism (whether it be a plant or the vegetative levels of an animal’s being) has a set of internally generated needs to fulfill, and of abilities or actions it can take to fulfill those needs. It moves and acts to fulfill those needs, it grows one direction to reach the sun, then another, then another, until it finds the direction of sunlight and gets around that rock. The fulfillment of its internal needs are the goal towards which it is acting, until it achieves the values which fulfill those needs. That is the nature of life.

Thus, the problem of the means by which vegetative action is directed to a future goal evaporates – because the goal of vegetative action is always the fulfillment of the present needs of the organism.

As far as the creation of new modes of action, just as organisms continuously rearrange the sequences of actions which they take to reach external goals, so I think they rearrange their internal sets of abilities to create new modes of action and new values. This is certainly the case in the development of creative thinking. And on the biological level, the origin of such complex systems as the eye are too unlikely to happen by a long series of chance mutations, and are too obviously functional _as a whole system_ in promoting the well-being of the organism, to have been caused by accident.

Binswanger began his argument by saying that purposeful action was the paradigm case from which we get our idea of teleology. In his discussion of vegetative action, he even tended to use concepts of consciousness, such as “value_significance_” and “_terms_ of operation.” Ironically, I think that, in fact, purposeful action is just another expression of life’s basic nature – its ability to act towards goals. It may be that in the ontology of concepts, teleology comes from purpose, but in the ontology of being, purpose comes from teleology.

Interestingly, in the arguments in which he attempts to _explain_ the goal-directedness of vegetative action, his very description of the proximate causes _assumes_ the existence of goal-directedness. On page 39, Binswanger says “Likewise, on the vegetative level, teleological explanation, I will argue, is not an irreducibly separate kind of explanation, but is rather a less detailed form of ordinary mechanical explanation in terms of efficient causes.” And on page 86, he says “The view I am defending, on the other hand, _assigns causal efficacy only to efficient causes_, but distinguishes between two kinds of efficient cause: proximate and ultimate.”

But he then describes the proximate causes as:

1. the fuel and

2. the _directive_ mechanism “whose existence, organization, fuel, and terms of operation result from the survival benefit that past instances of the goal have provided the organism in similar previous circumstances.” (p. 88). And Binswanger quotes Simpson as saying “To understand organisms, one must explain their organization.” (p. 82)

_How_ is the mechanism directive? What does “organization” mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines “organization” as “The action of organizing or condition of being organized as a living being; connection or coordination of parts for vital functioning…” What do the terms “directive” and “organization” imply but goal-oriented functioning? This makes the proximate causes _already_ goal-directed in themselves, apart from any consideration of any ultimate goals towards which they may be directed. It seems as if final causation, “ultimate” causation, is included in his very concept of proximate cause. And that is not surprising, because I don’t think that one can, in fact, reduce the proximate causes to mere mechanical causation. Life isn’t like that.

Music is an art without an apparent object – there are no scenes to look at, no

sculptured marbles to touch, no stories to follow – and yet it can cause some of the most

passionate and intense feelings possible. How does this happen – how can sounds from

resonant bodies produce emotion (1) in man?

Music is experienced as if it had the power to reach man’s emotions directly…Music communicates emotions, which one grasps, but does not actually feel; what one feels is a suggestion, a kind of distant, dissociated, depersonalized emotion — until and unless it unites with one’s own sense of life. But since the music’s emotional content is not communicated conceptually or evoked existentially, one does feel it in some peculiar, subterranean way…How can sounds reach man’s emotions directly, in a manner that seems to by-pass his intellect? What does a certain combination of sounds do to man’s consciousness to make him identify it as gay or sad?…The nature of musical perception has not been discovered because the key to the secret of music is physiological — it lies in the nature of the process by which man perceives sounds –and the answer would require the joint effort of a physiologist, a psychologist and a philosopher (an esthetician). (Rand 1971, 52-56)

Further, what is the possible biological function and evolutionary origin of this

process by which sound elicits feeling? As Ray Jackendorff says “there is no obvious

ecological pressure for the species to have a musical faculty, as there is for vision and

language” (1987, 211). In other words, there is no immediate and obvious biological

function for music, as there is for vision or language. One researcher in the psychology of

music aptly summarized the problem as follows:

Musical messages seem to convey no biologically relevant information, as do speech, animal utterances and environmental sounds – yet people from all cultures do react to musical messages. What in human evolution could have led to this? Is there, or has there been, a survival value for the human race in music? (Roederer 1984, 351).

One might object to this characterization with the question “But you are comparing

apples and oranges when you compare music to vision and language. Instead, you should

be comparing hearing to vision, and music to painting; you should be asking: What is the

biological function of art?”

I first wondered about the biological function and evolutionary origin of music over

twenty years ago, while I was reading Ayn Rand’s article on esthetics,

“Art and Cognition.” In that article, Rand gives an answer to

the question “What is the biological function of art?” in

general, but is only able to suggest an hypothesis about

music’s biological function. The problem lies, as I

mentioned at the start of this article, with the fact that

music does not, apparently, involve the perception of

entities. In the following, I shall attempt a fuller answer and thereby shed some light on

the question of how sounds from resonant bodies produce emotions in man. My attempt

is made possible by recent scientific research into the nature of the brain.

Unlike many twentieth century theorists, Rand’s esthetics is integrated with her

complex and persuasive philosophy of reason, reality and

man’s nature and I think her esthetics deserves special

attention as part of my examination of the nature of music.

I will examine some of the historical theories of musical

meaning, then the more recent scientific investigations into

the nature of music, including some of the current theories

of music’s biological function. I shall review some theories

of the nature of emotion and the relation of music to

emotion. I shall then offer my theory of the biological

origin of music. Subsequently, I shall consider Rand’s

hypothesis about the nature of music, in light of the

research evidence. Lastly, I shall suggest some possible

research which might confirm or disconfirm my theory.

I have gathered evidence from several areas of the

research literature in search of an answer to the question of

music’s evolutionary origin and biological function. I

believe this evidence indicates that music evolved out of the

sonority and prosody (2) of vocal communication and that

musical elaboration of those elements has a special

biological communication function. Prosody evidently

facilitates linguistic syntax – that is, the sound of language helps us understand the

meaning of what’s said (Shapiro and Nagel 1995).

Furthermore, some aspects of one’s pitch (3) perceptions in

music are evidently influenced by one’s native language and

dialect (Deutsch 1992).

More neuropsychological knowledge is needed to prove my

thesis – but I leave the reader to turning over the evidence

I have assembled, along with his own knowledge of music, in

considering the question: Why does man make music?

Brief History on the Theories of Music’s Nature

From the ancient world to the nineteenth century, men

theorized about music based on their experience of it, and

only a little scientific knowledge about the physics of

music which was first examined by the Pythagoreans. Two key

ideas have been repeated down through the ages:

1. Music is a form of communication, a kind of

language; in particular, the language of feeling.

2. Music can form or inform one’s feeling or

disposition.

The Ancient Greek “idea of music as essentially one with

the spoken word has reappeared in diverse forms throughout

the history of music” (Grout 1973,7). The Greeks “were

familiar with the idea that music can alter the disposition

of those who hear it. They acknowledge its power to soothe,

to console, to distract, to cheer, to excite, to inflame, to

madden” (West 1992, 31). Aristotle believed that “music has

a power of forming the character, and should therefore be

introduced into the education of the young” (Politics 1340b,

10-15). In one way or another, music touched everyone in

Greek civilization (West 1992).

The Greeks seemed to implicitly acknowledge music’s

connection to language in their refusal to create or accept

purely instrumental music. The early Middle-Age Europeans

did likewise, but eventually divorced music from voice, so

that by Hegel’s time, instrumental, wordless music was

considered a superior form (Bowie 1990, 183)

A connection of music to language was mentioned

frequently in late nineteenth century examinations of music’s

meaning. There are many, including Schopenhauer, Hegel, and

Tolstoy, who subscribed to the idea that music is “another

language,” the language of feeling.

Hegel relates music to “primitive” expressions, such as bird-song or wordless cries. Schleiermacher suggests the ambiguous status of music in relation to natural sound and to speech: “For neither the expression of a momentary sensation by a…speechless natural sound, nor speaking which approaches song are music, but only the transition to it” (Bowie 1990, 183).

Langer (1957) points out that music fails to qualify as

a language because it does not have fixed denotation.

And Nietzsche, in an 1871 fragment, took issue with the view

that music represents feeling:

What we call feelings are…already penetrated and saturated with conscious and unconscious representations and thus not directly the object of music, let alone able to produce music out of themselves (1980, 364, quoted in Bowie 1990, 230-31).

Feelings, Nietzsche claims, are actually only symbols of music, which has a prior ontological status. This opposes the commonplace in some Romantic thinking that music is the language, in the sense of the “representation”, the substitute, for feeling…Nietzsche’s view makes some sense if one ponders the fact that music can lead to the genesis of feelings which one had never had before hearing the music. (Bowie 1990, 231).

The modern scientific investigation of music began with

Hermann von Helmholtz’s study of the physics and

psychological effects of the tones and keys of music (1954

[1885]). Helmholtz argues that music does not use all types

of sound, only those “due to a rapid periodic motion of the

sonorous body; the sensation of a noise to non-periodic

motions.” (Helmholtz 1863, 9). Most researchers do not

question what sounds make music, but write with the

assumption that they are referring to sounds caused by

periodic vibrations (Aiello, Molfese, Sloboda, Stiller,

Lange, Schopenhauer, Trehub, Zatorre, etc.). “Tonal

stimulation is a constant factor of all musical stimulus”

(Meyer 1994, 13). The neurophysiological musical research

often revolves around contrasting responses of subjects to

periodic (tonal) versus nonperiodic (noise) sounds. Warren,

Obusek, and Farmer (1969) found the interesting fact that

subjects could not accurately perceive the temporal order of

four nonspeech, nonmusical sounds.

John Sloboda (1985) has examined various contemporary

scientific theories of musical meaning, among them the idea

that music mimics environmental sounds. The mimickry theory

is intriguing, but it seems to have a problem sufficiently

explaining the depth and range of meaning in music. Indeed,

music can aptly imitate some natural sounds, as did Saint-

Saens, in his “Carnival of the Animals.” But, even in music

considered to be as programmatic as Berlioz’ “Symphonie

Fantastique,” we cannot find environmental sounds of which

the music would be an imitation. To this point, Helmholtz

noted that

“In music one does not aim at representation of nature; rather, tones and tone sensations exist just for their own purpose and function independently of their relationship to any environmental object” (1863, 370).

Other theorists suggest that music has its effects by

expressing tension and its resolution (Schenker 1935;

Bernstein 1976). Tension and resolution are certainly a

large part of the musical experience, but they name only very

general qualities of it and do not seem to address the vast,

varied, and subtle ways music can make us feel.

Manfred Clynes sees music as the embodiment of the forms of emotion, “emotionally

expressive dynamic forms which we have called essentic forms”

(1986, 169). Clynes (1974, 1986) theory of music seems to parallel, for sound,

what Ekman proposed for facial expression. Ekman (1977) found that there is a

systematic relation between emotion and facial expression, and suggested that

this is a result of inborn “affect programmes” (automatically

triggered sequences of emotion), an idea also accepted by

by Tomkins (1962) and Izard (1971). Clynes thinks the essentic forms are biologically

determined expressions of emotion, experienced the same way

across cultures, which idea seems similar to “inborn affect

programmes”.

Essentic forms are specific spatio-temporal forms biologically programmed into the central nervous system for the expressive communication and generation of emotional qualities (1986, 169).

and one’s breath seems to become more ragged when one is angry, so there are typical

bodily changes due to the feelings which music evokes. This typicality is illustrated

and represented by the shape of the graph produced by

subjects’ fingers during experiments with Clynes’ sentograph.

The graph’s shape thereby represents the “form” of the

emotion. He has interesting data showing that the same music

will evoke similar motor responses in people of vastly

different cultures. His sentograph, which measures motor

response, attaches to the subject’s finger and records, on a

graph, subtle movements of the digit upon exposure to music.

Clynes found remarkable similarity among individual’s

responses to a given composer and between the responses of

different individuals to the same composer’s music, as

represented by the forms on the recording graphs. De Vries’

research confirms Clynes’ hypothesis that emotional responses

are similar among subjects and showed that responses to music

were “not affected by a subject’s familiarity with or

evaluation of a piece” (De Vries 1991, 46).

In a view which seems consonant with Clynes’,

Jackendorff points out that dance is closely related to

music, and that

going beyond crude rhythmic correspondences, we have undeniable and detailed intuitions concerning whether the character of dance movements suit or fail to suit the music. Such intuitions are patently not the result of deliberate training…This suggests that…a cognitive structure can be placed into close correspondence with musical structure…[which] might encode dance movements…[which can be] provisionally called body representation -essentially a body-specific encoding of the internal sense of the states of the muscles, limbs, and joints. Such a structure, in addition to representing the position of the body, would represent the dynamic forces present within the body, such as whether a position is being held in a state of relaxation or in a state of balanced tension….There is every reason to believe that such a representation is independently necessary for everyday tasks. …It would likely be involved as well in correspondences between emotional and muscular states -for instance, one carries oneself differently in states of joy, anger, depression, elation, or fear. (1987, 238-9)

Consonant with this view, Hevner (1936) found that

individuals show general agreement about the emotional

content of pieces of music and that there is broad agreement

among members of a culture about the musical mood of a piece,

even among children as young as three years of age (Kastner

and Crowder 1990). And Stiller notes that

a number of important musical universals have been identified: Melodies worldwide are made mostly of major seconds; all musics employ dynamic accents, and notes of varying lengths; and all display extensive use of variation and repetition…the universality of music suggests that there may be a biological basis for its existence. (1987, 13)

Research confirms the everyday experience that music

causes emotional states which can seriously affect our

actions. Konecni (1982) found that subjects who had been

insulted by confederates working for the experimenter were

quite aggressive about shocking those confederates. But

subjects who had merely been exposed to loud, complex music

were almost as aggressive about shocking confederates as the

insulted subjects had been! In another experiment subjects

were able to shape their moods by their musical choices, and

thereby optimize their moods. Depending on the way they felt

when they came to the experimental session (anxious or angry

or happy), and how they wanted to feel afterwards, they could

pick music that changed the way they felt entirely – once

again supporting the idea that the sounds of music have a

direct effect on emotions.

In many respects, mood is a better concept than

emotion to describe the results of music. Giomo says “This

affective meaning, labelled ‘mood’, is of an individual and

nameless nature, not truly describable using emotion labels”

(Giomo 1993, 143). Sloboda points out that “the ability to

judge mood is logically and empirically separable from the

ability to feel emotion in response to music. It is quite

possible to judge a piece of music to represent extreme

grief, yet be totally unmoved by it” (1991, 111). DeVries

(1991) suggested that there are two steps in reacting to

music: one in which music directly activates “programmes”

which trigger emotions and a second in which a person allows

themselves to experience the emotion or suppresses it,

depending on the congruity of the emotion with, among other

things, their personality and cultural background.

In searching for an evolutionary origin to music,

Konecni, as does Roederer (1984), posits that music helps to

synchronize the emotional states necessary for collective

action, such as the excitement needed for the hunt or battle.

Many primitive tribes seem to use music in this way (as do

college bands during football games). And, indeed, a few

other species, such as birds and cetaceans, have music-

like behaviors (4), wherein they produce sounds of periodic

vibrations and which are intimately tied to intra-species

communication and collective action. Stiller claims that

“Music helps to insure…cooperation — indeed, must

play an important role in that regard, or there would have

been no need to evolve such a unique form of emotional

communication” (1987, 14). He quotes Alan Lomax to the

effect that music organizes the mood, the feelings, the

general attitude of a group of people. This seems to echo

the Ancient Greek view that music teaches men how to feel

like warriors or like lovers.

Granted,

…there may be a certain cultural advantage in having some rudimentary form of music to help synchronize collective rhythmic activity or to serve some ceremonial aspect of social life, no particular reason is evident for the efflorescence of musical complexity that appears in so many cultures (Jackendorff 1987, 214).

The socio-biological theory of musical meaning may

explain some of the psychological roots of music’s evolutionary origins but what

determines the kinds of sounds which can cause the experience

of emotion, i.e. the neurological roots? And why do we have so many kinds of music

which we listen to for its own sake?

The Neuropsychological Data on Language and Music

Why should certain kinds of sounds be able to directly

evoke feeling? By what means, what neuropsychological

processes?

As have so many in the history of music theory, Roederer

(1984) wonders whether the answer lies in the unique human

capacity for language. Human infants have high motivation to

acquire language, as evidenced by the assiduous way they

attend to, imitate, and practice language. Language

activities are very pleasurable; if they were not, human

infants would not be motivated to perform language-related

activities as much as they do. On this evidence, I venture

to say that humans have built-in developmental pleasure/pain

processes for producing and listening to language. Language

acquisition is a cognitive activity that is highly motivated

and important to survival. Are the emotions aroused for

language acquisition the evolutionary link between sound and

emotion? That is, are humans moved by sound as a result of a biological need to be

interested in acquiring language?

Experiments show that there are strong similarities in the way in which people perceive structure in music and in language…[but] overall, the syntax of music has much more latitude than that of language. Thus, in the syntaxes of music and language, we must remember that music is far more flexible and ambiguous than language (Aiello 1994, 46-9).

Furthermore, neuropsychological evidence seems to be a

odds with the proposal that language is the basis of music.

The areas of the brain which primarily process speech are,

apparently, mostly different from those which process music

(5). Investigations into the brain areas which process

speech and music have turned up the interesting finding that,

in most infants, the left hemisphere responds more to speech

sounds and the right to musical tones, as indicated by a type

of EEG called auditory evoked potentials, (Molfese 1977).

Measures of how much attention a neonate paid to left or

right ear stimuli (as indicated by “high amplitude non-

nutritive sucking”) indicated that most infants responded

more to language sounds presented to their right ears (left

hemispheres) and to musical sounds presented to their left

ears (right hemispheres) (Entus 1977; Glanville, Best, and

Levenson 1977), although Vargha-Khadem and Corbellis (1979)

were not able to replicate Entus’ findings. Best, Hoffman,

and Glanville (1982) found a right ear advantage for speech

in infants older than two months during tasks in which

infants had to remember and discriminate phonetic sounds and

musical timbres. Infants younger than two months showed an

ear advantage only for musical notes, and that advantage was

for the left ear. In older children and adult non-musicians,

damage to the left hemisphere usually impairs language

functions but tends to spare musical abilities, including

singing. Damage to the right hemisphere, particularly the

right temporal lobe, tends to leave language functions

intact, but impairs musical abilities and the production and

comprehension of language tone and of emotion expressed

through language or other sounds (Joanette, Goulet, and

Hannequin 1990).

Zatorre (1979) found a left ear advantage for the

discrimination of melodies versus speech in a dichotic (6)

listening task with both musicians and nonmusicians. He

found cerebral-blood-flow evidence that right temporal lobe

neurons are particularly important in melodic and pitch

discriminations (Zatorre, Evans, and Meyer 1994). Tramo and

Bharucha (1991), following the work of Gordon (1970), found

that the right hemisphere seems to process the perception of

harmonics (tested by the detection of complex relationships

among simultaneous musical sounds). Damage to the right

temporal lobe impairs the ability to recognize timbre (7),

and time cues within tones that determine the recognition of

timbre (Samson and Zatorre 1993). These authors suggest that

“the same acoustical cues involved in perception of musical

timbre may also serve as linguistic cues under certain

circumstances” (Ibid., 239). There are now indications that

timbre and phonetic information are processed through some

common stage beyond peripheral acoustic processing. Research

is underway to determine whether voice identification also

proceeds through this same timbre-phoneme nonperipheral stage

(Pitt 1995).

In a critical review, Zatorre (1984) notes that right-

sided damage can produce deficits in tasks that process

patterns of pitch and timbre differences. Adults with

partial or complete excisions of the right temporal lobe were

found to be significantly impaired in the perception of pitch

(Zatorre 1988). Kester et. al (1991) found that musical

processing was most affected by right temporal lobectomy. In

a review of the literature on the infant’s perception of tone

sequences, or melodies, Trehub (1990) found that human

infants do not use local pitch strategies characteristic of

nonhuman species, that is, they do not depend on the

recognition of particular, or absolute pitches, to identify

tone sequences. Rather, like human adults, they use global

and relational means to encode and retain contours of

melodies, with little attention to absolute pitch. (Although,

interestingly, Kessen, Leving and Wendrich (1979) found that

infants paid very close attention to experimenters’ singing

and could imitate pitch quite well.) In other words, human

infants have the ability to recognize exact pitches, but the

exact key in which a melody is played makes little difference

for human recognition of melody, while animals depend on the

particular pitch in which their “song” is sung to recognize

it. This seems to imply that even human infants are

extracting the abstract pattern of the sounds, rather than

using the sounds as signs, specific perceptual markers, of

events.

In reviewing the research on infants’ perception of

music, Trehub (1987) suggests that infants have the skills

for analyzing complex auditory stimuli. These skills may

correspond to musical universals, as indicated by infants’

preference for major triadic chord structures.

The evidence indicates that human infants have the

ability to recognize and process music in a fairly complex

way, at a very early age. Furthermore, music processing in

most infants and adults seems to occur primarily in the right

hemisphere (8).

And infants, like adults, appear to find music

interesting: they tend to pay attention to it, they like to

engage in imitations of adult pitches and, they learn to sing

as soon as they learn to speak (Cook 1994).

The Neuropsychological Data on Emotions

How does the data on the neuropsychological processes

involved in music relate to the data on the

neuropsychological processes involved in emotions? It is

well-established that for most people, right hemisphere

damage causes difficulties with the communication and

comprehension of emotion (Bear 1983; Ross 1984). Apparently,

the right hemisphere mediates the processing of many types of

emotionally-laden information: visual, facial, gestural,

bodily, and auditory.

The evidence suggests that the right hemisphere has a

special relationship with the emotional functions of the

human mind, specifically in being able to process and project

emotional meaning through perceptual information (Kolb and

Whishaw 1990). For most people, the right hemisphere

performs integrative visual functions, such as grasping

visual gestalts and comprehending visual and architectural

wholes; the inability to recognize faces is sometimes the

consequence of right temporal lobe damage. (Kolb and

Whishaw, 1990) Right hemisphere damage can often lead to the

inability to be aware of whole areas of space in relation to

oneself, called perceptual neglect. (See A. Luria’s The Man

With A Shattered World for an agonizing description of what

the world seems like when one’s brain cannot perform these

visual and kinesthetic integrations.) Neglect of half of

perceived space, called hemi-neglect, is a frequent result of

extensive right parietal damage. The right hemisphere is

fundamentally involved in comprehending the connotative

meanings of language, metaphors and nonliteral implications

of stories; and the right hemisphere seems to be involved in

the comprehension of meaning commmunicated through sound,

especially voice. Oliver Sacks discusses patients with

“tonal agnosia,”

For such patients, typically, the expressive qualities of voices disappear – their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character – while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood. Such tonal agnosias (or ‘aprosodias’) are associated with disorders of the right temporal lobe, whereas aphasias go with disorders of the left temporal lobe (1987, 83).

He also describes aphasics (9) who are not able to grasp the

denotative meaning of words and yet are able to follow many

conversations by the emotional tone of the speakers.

With the most sensitive patients, it was only with [grossly artificial mechanical speech from a computerised voice synthesizer] that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia (Ibid., 80-1).

The patients would use all kinds of extraverbal clues to

understand what another was saying to them. He claimed that

a roomful of them laughed uproariously over a speech given by

Ronald Reagan because of the patent insincerity of it.

Rate, amplitude, pitch, inflection, timbre, melody, and

stress contours of the voice are means by which emotion is

communicated (in nonhuman as well as human species), and the

right hemisphere is superior in the interpretation of these

features of voice (Joseph 1988). Samson and Zatorre (1993)

found similar cortical areas responding to pitch and timbre

in humans and animals. In dichotic listening tasks, Zurif

and Mendelsohn (1972) found a right ear advantage for

correctly matching meaningless, syntactically organized

sentences with meaningful ones by the way the sentence was

emotionally intoned. The subjects could apparently match

such nonsense sentences as: “Dey ovya ta ransch?” with “How

do you do?” by the intonation the speaker gave the sentence.

Heilman, Scholes, and Watson (1975) found that subjects with

right temporal-parietal lesions tended to be impaired at

judging the mood of a speaker. Heilman et. al (1984) also

compared subjects with right temporal lobe-damage to both

normals and aphasics (4) in discriminating the emotional

content of speech. He presented all three types of subjects

with sentences wherein the verbal content of the speakers was

filtered out and only the emotional tone was left, and found

those with temporal lobe damage to be impaired in their

emotional discriminations. In a similar study, Tompkins and

Flowers (1985) found that the tonal memory scores (how well

the subjects could remember specific tones) for right

braindamaged subjects were lower than those of other

subjects, implying that right braindamage leads to a problem

with the perceptual encoding of sound, put not necessarily

with the comprehension of emotional meaning per se.

The human voice conveys varied, complex, and subtle

meaning through timbre, pitch, stress contour, tempo, and so

forth and thereby communicates emotion.

What is clear is that the rhythmic and the musical are not contingent additions to language….The “musical” aspect of language emphasizes the way that all communication has an irreducibly particular aspect which cannot be substracted (Bowie 1990, 174).

Best, Hoffman, and Glanville found that the ability to

process timbre appears in neonates and very young infants,

apparently before the ability to process phonetic stimuli

1982).

Through the “music” in voice, we comprehend the feelings

of others and we communicate ours to them. This is an

important ability for the well-being of the human infant, who

has not yet developed other human tools for communicating its

needs and comprehending the world around it – a world in

which the actions and feelings of its caretakers are of

immense importance to its survival. Emotion is conveyed

through language in at least two ways: through the

specifically verbal content of what is said, and through the

“musical” elements in voice, which are processed by the right

hemisphere. One of the characteristic features of

traditional poetry is the dense combination of the meaning of

words with the way they sound, which, when done well, results

in emotionally moving artworks (Enright 1989). Mothers

throughout the world use nursery rhymes, a type of poetry, to

amuse and soothe infants and young children, that is, to

arouse emotions they find desirable in the children. “Music

can articulate the ‘unsayable’, which is not representable by

concepts or verbal language” (Bowie, 1990, 184). “Men have not found the words for it

nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music” (Rand 1943, 544) .

Was nature being functionally logical and parsimonious

to combine, in the right hemisphere, those functions which

communicate emotion with those that comprehend emotion?

As social animals, humans have many ways of

communicating and comprehending emotions: facial expression,

gesture, body language, and voice tone. I propose that

music’s biopsychological origins lie in the ability to

recognize and respond directly to the feelings of another

through tone of voice, an important ability for infant and

adult survival. (The tone of voice of an angry and menacing

person has a very different implication than that of a sweet

and kind person.)

If inflection and nuance enhance the effect of spoken language, in music they create the meaning of the notes. Unlike words, notes and rests do not point to ideas beyond themselves; their meaning lies precisely in the quality of the sounds and silences, so that the exact renderings of the notes, the nuances, the inflection, the intensity and energy with which notes are performed become their musical meaning. (J. M. Lewers, quoted in Aiello 1994, 55)

Furthermore, I propose that the sound literally triggers

those physiological processes which cause the corresponding

emotion “action programmes,” “essentic forms,” or whatever

one wishes to call these processes. This would explain the

uniquely automatic quality in our response to music.

I am proposing that the biopsychological basis of the

ability of sound to cause emotions in man originates in man’s

ability to emotionally respond to the sounds of another’s

voice. Theoretically, this ability lies in the potential for

certain kinds of sounds to set off a series of neurological

processes resulting in emotions, which events are similar to

those occurring during the usual production of emotions.

As so many in the history of musical theory have conjectured,

music does result from language – but not language’s abstract,

denotative qualities.

However, I should posit that it is not the ontogeny of

language per se that caused the development of music in

humans. Many nonhuman animals communicate emotion and

subsequently direct and orchestrate actions of their species

through voice tone, and there is considerable evidence that

humans do likewise, which argues that this ability arose

before the emergence of language.

Returning to my earlier

discussion of motivation in the infant acquisition of

language, it seems more likely that the pleasures and

emotions communicated through voice (which motivate the

acquisition of language) are another biological application

of the ability of voice tone to emotionally affect us, rather

than an initial cause of emotion in voice. Human’s were

already set to be affected by voice tone when we acquired the

ability to speak. Pleasure associated with vocalizing likely

developed into pleasure in language acquisition.

However, music, especially modern Western music, has

gone far beyond the kinds of auditory perceptions and

responses involved in simple tone of voice alone. The

ability to emotionally recognize and respond to tone of voice

was developed early on in the evolution of Homo sapiens, as

evidenced by the same ability in our closest animal

relatives, the great apes. The history of music seems to

show that humans greatly expanded on the use of voice tone

through their ability to abstract. It appears that men

created instruments, learned how to distill and extract the

essence of tones and their relationships, rearranged and

expanded the range, timbre, and rhythm of sounds used both by

voice and by instruments, and thereby created a new, artistic

means of expressing a huge range of emotions.

The evidence found by Clynes and others indicates that

there is a special pattern of sound for each emotion or mood,

which pattern humans are able to recognize in various voices,

both human and instrumental. Helmholtz noted that the major

keys are

well suited for all frames of mind which are completely formed and clearly understood, for strong resolve, and for soft and gentle or even for sorrowing feelings, when the sorrow has passed into the condition of dreamy and yielding regret. But it is quite unsuited for indistinct, obscure, unformed frames of mind, or for the expressing of the dismal, the dreary, the enigmatic, the mysterious, the rude…[and it is] precisely for these …[that] we require the minor mode (1954 [1885], 302)

The implication of the evidence is that humans have learned

how to abstract the sound pattern evoking, for example

triumph, and then re-present this pattern in its

essential form in a musical composition, giving the listener

an experience of the emotion of triumph rarely possible in

life. Through abstraction, the emotion-provoking sounds have

been rendered essential and rearranged into new patterns and

combinations, thereby enabling humans to have an emotion-

evoking artistic experience far greater than that possible

from the sounds of the spoken voice alone. Many theories of

music, to some extent, recognize that music makers take the

fundamental qualities of music and rearrange them to invent

new ways of feeling – see any number of essays in Philip

Alperson’s book What is Music?

In relation to this theory, it is noteworthy that only

the sounds of periodic vibrations can be integrated so as to

evoke emotion because the voice produces periodic vibrations

in its normal operation. (Despite the best efforts of modern

musical theorists, all else is experienced as meaningless

noise.) In the history of music theory, thinkers have placed

most of their emphasis on the relations and perceptions of

harmonies (Grout 1973; Lang 1941). My proposal for the

biological basis of music concerns a system generally without

harmony – the human voice (there are some harmonic overtones

in any voice or instrument). How do these factors relate to

one another? Historically, music began as plainsong without

accompaniment and as simple melodies.

The fact that music could achieve simultaneity, that it could have vertical as well as horizontal events, was a revolutionary discovery….Now music had a new kind of interest, the accidental or contrived vertical combination of two or more pitches” (Aiello 1994, 44)

Although polyphony (10) was created some time during the

Middle Ages, apparently the conscious use of harmonic chords

was developed even later.

Helmholtz mentions that

A favourite assertion that “melody is resolved harmony,” on which musicians do not hesitate to form musical systems without staying to inquire how harmonies had either never been heard, or were, after hearing, repudiated. According to our explanation, at least, the same physical peculiarities in the composition of musical tones, which determined consonances for tones struck simultaneously, would also determine melodic relations for tones struck in sucession. The former then would not be the reason for the latter, as the above phrase suggests, but both would have a common cause in the natural formation of musical tones (1954 [1885], 289).

In other words, harmony and melody complement each other,

using the same mathematical relationships of tones and their

perception. Harmony does this simultaneously, melody does

this over time. However, harmony is not an equal partner in the creation of music,

because we can make music without harmony and because harmony does not make

music on its own: music requires a sequence of sounds and silences through

time. Harmony developed as man abstracted musical

qualities in sound, rearranged them, and used them

simultaneously. It is likely that theoreticians have focused

on harmony in their analysis of music because complex

harmonies are a major part of modern western music and

because melodies are more difficult to analyze due to the the

element of time. Given the historical development of music,

I believe the emphasis on harmony is an artifact of human

analytical ability. Moreover, an harmonic chord on its own

is not music – it is always necessary to have a sequence of

tones to have music.

Beyond Neuropsychology to Music as Art

I have posited a biological/evolutionary origin to music, but I have not, as yet,

proposed a survival function for it. Before I do that, I would like to address the wider

issue of the biological function of art per se. In her article “Art and Cognition,” Rand

(1971) presented her theory on the cognitive foundations of art.

This theory is of particular interest to me, not only because

it is founded on and well-integrated with her revolutionary

philosophy of Objectivism, but because it is specifically

based on man’s cognitive and motivational nature, on what she

called his “psycho-epistemological needs” (11), and thereby posits gives an answer to the

question of art’s biological roots. Her hypothesis in no way addresses or accounts for my

original question, What is the evolutionary basis of the ability to respond to sound? With

her hypothesis, the question remains unanswered. But her theory

is worth addressing because she asked and attempted to answer

many of the fundamental questions about music’s nature.

Rand argued that art is a means of making

conceptual yet concrete the information of the senses, which,

thereby, makes that information more meaningful to us.

The visual arts do not deal with the sensory field of awareness as such, but with the sensory field as perceived by a conceptual consciousness.

The sensory-perceptual awareness of an adult does not consist of mere sense data (as it did in his infancy), but of automatized integrations that combine sense data with a vast context of conceptual knowledge. The visual arts refine and direct the sensory elements of these integrations. By means of selectivity, of emphasis and omission, these arts lead man’s sight to the conceptual context intended by the artist. They teach man to see more precisely and to find deeper meaning in the field of vision. (Rand 1971, 47)

Painting makes conceptual the sense of sight, sculpture the

sense of sight and touch, dance the sense of body motion, or

kinesthesia, and music the sense of hearing.

But Rand argued that music does not follow exactly the

same psycho-epistemological process as the other arts.

According to Rand, the art of music embodies man’s sense of

life by abstracting how man uses his mind.

The other arts create a physical object,…and the psycho-epistemological process goes from the perception of the object to the conceptual grasp of its meaning, to an appraisal in terms of one’s basic values, to a consequent emotion. The pattern is: from perception – to conceptual understanding – to appraisal – to emotion.

The pattern of the process involved in music is: from perception – to emotion – to appraisal – to conceptual understanding.

Music is experienced as if it had the power to reach man’s emotions directly (Rand 1971, 50)

In other words, upon listening to music, it can cause us to

experience feelings which we subsequently appraise. Whether

we like or dislike the feelings caused by the music (or have

some complex reaction to it), helps determine what kinds of

music we individually favor. An interesting facet of the

musical experience is the fact that many unrelated images

tend to come to mind when we listen to music, imagery which

seems to correspond to the emotions. It is as if our minds

find it illogical to have feelings with no existential

objects to evoke them, so our minds provide images of an

appropriate nature. This process seems reminiscent of others, such as the way in which

we “see” faces in myriad visual images, or think we hear voices in the sound of the wind.

The common thread between them is the mind’s automatic attempt to make sense of the

world, both external and internal.

According to Rand, how might sound evoke these emotions?

If man experiences an emotion without existential object, its only other possible object is the state or actions of his own consciousness. What is the mental action involved in the perception of music? (I am not referring to the emotional reaction, which is the consequence, but to the process of perception.)…The automatic processes of sensory integration are completed in his infancy and closed to an adult.

The single exception is in the field of sounds produced by periodic vibrations, i.e., music…musical tones heard in a certain kind of succession produce a different result -the human ear and brain integrate them into a new cognitive experience, into what may be called an auditory entity; a melody. The integration is a physiological process; it is performed unconsciously and automatically. Man is aware of the process only by means of its results.

Helmholtz has demonstrated that the essence of musical perception is mathematical; the consonance or dissonance of harmonies depends on the ratios of the frequencies of their tones…[There is] the possibility that the same principles apply to the process of hearing and integrating a succession of musical tones, i.e., a melody — and that the psycho-epistemological meaning of a given composition lies in the kind of work it demands of a listener’s ear and brain (Rand 1971, 57-8)

Music gives man’s consciousness the same experience as the other arts: a concretization of his sense of life. But the abstraction being concretized is primarily epistemological, rather than metaphysical; the abstraction is man’s consciousness, i.e., his method of cognitive functioning, which he experiences in the concrete form of hearing a specific piece of music. A man’s acceptance or rejection of that music depends on whether it calls upon or clashes with, confirms or contradicts, his mind’s way of working. The metaphysical aspect of the experience is the sense of a world which he is able to grasp, to which his mind’s working is appropriate….A man who has an active mind…will feel a mixture of boredom and resentment when he hears a series of random bits with which his mind can do nothing. He will feel anger, revulsion and rebellion against the process of hearing jumbled musical sounds; he will experience it as an attempt to destroy the integrating capacity of his mind.” (Rand 1971, 58) 1971)

In other words, she proposed that the arrangement of sounds

in music causes one’s brain to perform a sensory/perceptual

integration similar to those performed during the solution of

an existential problem, and that one emotionally reacts to

the kind of cognitive work which the music makes one perform

through the integration.

In line with the assumptions of musical research, she

notes that only sounds caused by periodic vibrations can be

integrated by the human brain. We can analyze the sounds of

music as follows: simultaneous sounds into harmonies,

successions of sounds into melodies, or what Rand called

“auditory entities” and percussions into rhythms.

According to Rand’s hypothesis, musical sounds are

physiologically integrated by the brain and our emotions are

in response to the type of integration performed. She

proposed that the musical integration parallels perceptual

integration in nonmusical cognitive activities, and that we

respond emotionally to the type of integrating work music

causes us to perform. Her hypothesis assumes no direct

physiological induction of emotion, but proposes that the

emotion is a response to the kind of cognitive work caused by

the integration of the sounds.

Is this view consonant with the scientific facts?

Rand’s hypothesis supposes that a perceptual integration

results in emotions such as joy, delight, triumph, which are

normally generated in humans by a complex conceptual

cognitive activity. I am not aware of any other purely

perceptual integrations in other sense modalities which

result in such emotions (although there may be some visual

stimuli, such as a beautiful sunset or graceful human

proportions, for which we have in-built pleasurable

responses). In this respect, sound seems to be unique.

Idiot-savants and some individuals with IQ’s in the

teens, respond fully to music, as well as

A man whom childhood meningitis had left mentally retarded as well as behaviorally and emotionally crippled, but who…was so familiar with… all the Bach cantatas, as well as a staggering amount of other music)…evincing a full understanding and appreciation of these highly intellectual scores. Clearly, whatever had happened to the rest of his brain, his musical intelligence remained a separate – and unimpaired – function (Stiller 1987, 13).

Under Rand’s theory, is this possible? Such cognitively

impaired individuals would not normally perform many complex

conceptual mental integrations, nor experience the feelings

accompanying those integrations. One might infer that these

mental cripples, unable to self-generate cognitive activities

which would allow them the pleasures of deep feelings, are

enabled the life-giving experience of such feelings through

music (hence, some of them completely devote themselves to

music). That is, their cognitions are not complex enought to produce many profound and

pleasurable feelings on their own, but they are able to pleasurably shape their emotional

world with music. Presumably, if their perceptual abilities are

intact, their brains could still perform the integrations

necessary under Rand’s hypothesis. But how could their

psycho-epistemological sense of life respond to the

activities, in that they are not capable of much in the way

of conceptual activity?

However, consider the following:

If a given process of musical integration taking place in a man’s brain resembles the cognitive processes that produce and/or accompany a certain emotional state, he will recognize it, in effect, physiologically, then intellectually. Whether he will accept that particular emotional state, and experience it fully, depends on his sense-of-life evaluation of its significance.” (Rand 1971, 61)

Here, she seemed to say that the processing and integrating

of the sounds are very similar to the physiological processes

involved in the existential evocations of emotions. In other

words, her statement seems to imply that she thinks the music

physiologically induces the emotion, which is subsequently

evaluated and accepted or rejected.

It seems to me that Rand was not perfectly clear as to

the exact nature of music’s production of emotions. On the

one hand, she seemed to say that the emotions are a reaction

to the kind of cognitive work the music causes us to perform.

On the other hand, she seemed to say that the music

physiologically induces the emotion.

Parsimony inclines me to take this analysis one step

further and propose that musical sounds induce the

neurological processes that cause the emotions; then we react

to the feeling of those emotions. Instead of proposing, like

Rand, that the essence of music is epistemological – we react

to the kind of cognitive work music causes – I would like to

maintain that the essence is metaphysical, like the other

arts – we react to the way the music makes us feel. That

is, by neurologically inducing emotions, music shapes our

feelings about the world. If painting is the concretization

of sight, music is the concretization of feeling.

Rand recognizes this to some extent, “How can sounds

reach man’s emotions directly in a manner that seems to by-

pass his intellect?” (1971, 54) This question seems to imply

that she thinks the musical sensory integration affects

feelings directly.

It is relevant to the issue that there are direct

sensory projections from the ear to the amygdala, a nuclei of

cells at the base of the temporal lobe (where so much music

processing seems to occur). The amygdala is part of the

limbic system, considered essential to the production and

processing of emotion. Although part of the temporal lobe,

the amygdala is not considered to be part of the cortical

sensory analysis systems that process the objective

properties of an experience. Instead the amygdala is

believed to process our feeling or subjective sense of an

experience (Kolb and Whishaw 1990) – that is, how we feel

about an experience, such as the warm cozy feelings we might

get at the smell of turkey and apple pie. It seems possible

that the sounds of music could be directly processed by the

amygdala, resulting directly in emotion, without going

through the usual “objective-properties” processing of the

other cortical areas. This might be how they “reach man’s

emotions directly in a manner that seems to by-pass his

intellect?” (Rand 1971,)

However, we might find a resolution to the seeming

duality of Rand’s musical hypothesis by further reflecting on

music’s nature. I believe the key lies in the complexity of

music. There are large elements of cognitive understanding

and processing involved in more complex music, e.g., there is

a definite process involved in learning to listen to

classical music, or any kind for that matter.

Musicians are much more sensitive to and analytical

about music, and, interestingly, apparently use different

areas of their brains than do nonmusicians when processing

music. Musicians do quite a bit of processing in the left

hemisphere, in areas that apparently process in a

logical/analytical manner. Some music triggers some emotion

in almost everyone, although I think that perhaps mood, as

suggested by Giomo, would be a better term to describe much

of the psychophysical state that music induces. We can

listen to music, know what emotion it represents, but not

want or like that emotion. In this way, Rand seems right

that music causes our minds to go through the cognitive steps

which result in various emotions. However, in line with the

arguments made by many, not everyone can follow the cognitive

steps necessary in listening to all music: there is a certain

amount of learning involved in the appreciation of music and

it seems to be related, for example, to learning the forms,

context, and style of the music of a culture. Beyond that,

there is learning involved in absorbing and responding to

music of different genres: jazz, blues, celtic folk, african

folk, classical. One gets to understand the ways and the

patterns of each genre such that one’s mind can better follow

the musical thoughts and respond to them with feeling

(Aiello 1994).

Music can take on a cognitive life entirely its own,

apart from and different from the kinds of thoughts and

feelings resulting from life or the other arts. As the

Greeks thought, it can teach us new things to think and feel.

Certainly, the kind of utterly intense emotion felt through

exalted music is rare, if possible at all, through other

events of life. Listening to contemporary music such as the

Drovers (Celtic style), I realized that it made me feel all

kinds of wonderful and unusual bodily feelings, which had no

regular emotional names, although they were similar to other

emotions. This might explain why we like to listen to the

same piece of music over and over. “Wittengenstein’s

paradox: the puzzle is that when we are familiar with a piece

of music, there can be no more surprises. Hence, if

‘expectancy violation’ is aesthetically important, a piece

would lose this quality as it becomes familiar”

(Bharucha 1994, 215). We do not particularly like to think

about the same things over and over, but we generally like to

feel certain ways over and over. We listen to the same piece

over and over because we enjoy the mood, the frame of mind,

into which it puts us. Of what else does the end of life consist, but good experience, in

whatever form one can find it? Thinking is the means by which we maintain and

advance life, but feeling happy is an end in itself.

To resolve Rand’s duality: the basis of music is the

neurological induction of mood through sound (made

possible, in my view, by our ability to respond to the

emotional meaning of voice); however, humans have taken that

basic ability and elaborated it greatly, abstracting and

rearranging sound in many, many different ways in all the

different kinds of music. Responding to more complex music

requires more elaborate, specifically musical understanding

of the sounds and their interrelationships. This

understanding requires learning on the part of the listener

and complex cognitive work – to which the listener responds

emotionally.

Hence, there are two emotional levels on which we

respond to music which correspond to the two aspects of

Rand’s hypothesis: the basic neurological level and the more

complex cognitive level.

Future Research

My hypothesis on the evolutionary basis of music in our

ability to respond to emotion in tone of voice would need a

vast array of experiments to be proved, including further

inquiry into the neurological structures which process voice

tone and music. Presumably, if the hypothesis is true, a

significant overlap would be found in the the areas that

process voice tone and the areas that process music.

Particular care would be needed to discover which neocortical

structures are involved in these functions, including an

examination of such structures as the associative areas

including the temporal lobe, and the limbic structures. And

subcortical areas such as the hypothalamus and brain stem,

presumed to be involved in emotional processing

(Siminov 1986), would need to be examined as well.

A technique such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

(12) might be useful in such an inquiry. Experiments

indicating that this overlap exists in young infants would

show that this was an inborn, and not a learned ability.

Care would need to be taken in arranging several experimental

conditions for comparison. Techniques such as the one

described earlier in this essay, wherein the verbal content

was filtered out of sentences, would be useful. Comparisons

of the response to (1) voice with no verbal content or music,

(2) music with no voice, (3) voice with music, with and

without verbal content and (4) nonemotionally meaningful

sounds made without voice would be important.

Also, it might be found that voice with no music, voice

with music, and music with no voice are each processed in a

different set of areas. Alternatively, it is possible that

no subcortical emotional effects would be found from voice or

music. Or, perhaps, the processing of the voice and/or the

music would be found to be spread over both hemispheres of

the brain in a way which did not become evident in the evoked

potentials. Some of the brain damage studies found that

right hemisphere damage did not universally cause amusia or

failure to comprehend or express emotional tone, and that

some subjects recovered their abilities to express or grasp

emotion through language. Furthermore, it is difficult to

know how varying individual brain organization might express

itself in the processing of these tasks.

Interesting and observable differences might be found

across languages or language groups. The relation, if any,

of a language to it’s folk music would be fascinating (13).

Here I’d like to recall Jackendorff’s comments. He

remarked on the ability of music to make us feel like moving,

and that there are specific ways we seem to feel like moving

to specific kinds of music.

Ultimately, if we learn enough to specify exactly the relationships between the

elements of music and what feelings are evoked, we will be able to decipher music as

“the language of feeling.” I look forward to the research which will resolve these

1. “An emotion is the psychosomatic form in which man experiences his estimate of the beneficial or harmful relationship of some aspect of reality to himself.” (Branden 1966, 64). This definition is echoed in Carroll Izard’s work Human Emotions (1977) “A complete definition of emotion must take into account all… of these aspects or components: (a) the experience or conscious feeling of emotion, (b) the processes that occur in the brain and nervous system, and (c) the observable expressive patterns of emotion, particularly those on the face…scientists do not agree on precisely how an emotion comes about. Some maintain that emotion is a joint function of a physiologically arousing situation and the person’s evaluation or appraisal of the situation” (1977, 4).

2. “Prosody” is pitch, change of pitch, and duration of intonations and rests in speech.

3. “Pitch – 23. Acoustics. the apparent predominant frequenc sounded by an acoustical source.” (Random House Dictionary of the English Language, New York: Random House Publishing Co., 1968)

4. The activites are “music-like” because they employ sequences of sounds made by periodic vibrations. However, because of the cognitive levels of the animals involved, the “songs” are not abstracted, arrayed and integrated into an artwork and thus are not music. It is even likely that the animals experience their “songs” as integrated perceptual experiences, which communicate valuable information to them, or trigger a series of valuable actions in them. Because our physiology is so different from that of birds and cetaceans, we may not experience the “songs” as perceptually integrated units, but the respective animals might. Regardless of whether the “songs” are perceptually integrated or not to the birds, dolphins or whales involved, the “songs” are still not artworks, because they are not conceptually organized (Nottebohm 1989). Likewise, animals usually seem indifferent to human music. There are at least two reasons for this: their physiologies are different, thus they do not hear and perceptually integrate sound the same way humans do; and they do not have the power to abstract patterns from percepts the way humans do. Trehub (1987) found that, unlike animals, even human infants process music by relational means and do not rely on absolute pitch the way animals do.

5. In brain research, investigators have found evidence for the same general types of brain processes in the same areas for 95% of the subjects. I am reporting the kinds of functional asymmetries which have been discovered for those 95%. Thus, when I note that “language functions are in the left hemisphere and musical tone recognition in the right,” I am referring to this 95% of the population.

6. In a dichotic listening task, the subject is presented with two different stimuli to his different ears, simultaneously. Whichever stimuli the subject tends to notice indicates that the ear to which it was presented has an advantage for that kind of stimuli.

7. “Timbre – 1. Acoustics, Phonet. the characteristic quality of a sound, independent of pitch and loudness but dependent on the relative strengths of the components of different fequencies, determined by resonance. 2. Music. the characteristic quality of sound produced by a particular instrument or voice; one color.” (Random House Dictionary of the English Language, New York: Random House Publishing Co., 1968)

8. There is evidence that musicians in particular do what appears to be more logico-analytical processing of music in the left hemisphere (Bever and Chiarello 1974). Messerli, Pegna, and Sordet (1995) found musicians superior in identifying melody with their right ear. Schlaug and Steinmetz found that professional musicians, especially those who have perfect pitch, have far larger planum temporales on their left side (Nowak 1995).

9. Aphasia is a condition in which a person has difficulty in producing and/or comprehending language due to neurological conditions.

10. Polyphony is a type of music where multiple voices sing independent melodies. Often, the melodies selected do harmonize beautifully, but polyphony is not considered harmonic in the ususal sense, because it does not use harmonic chords in its composition, but relies on the incidental harmonization of the tones of the multiple melodies into chords.

11. “Psycho-epistemology is the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.” (Rand 1971, 20)

12. Positron Emission Tomography is a technique which measures the rate of glucose metabolism in neurological structures during tasks. The brain uses a tremendous amount of glucose whenever it works. It is inferred that brain structures using the most glucose during a given task are the ones performing the neurological processes necessary for that task.

13. My thanks to Mr. Peter Saint-Andre for pointing out these possibilities.

Formerly a psychotherapist, Marsha Enright, co-founded the Council Oak Montessori School (elementary level) in 1990, of which she is the president and administrator. Another cofounder of the school and its corporate secretary, Doris Cox, currently teaches middle school children at Council Oak.

The education of the human child is of profound importance to anyone dedicated to achieving “the best within us,” but especially to those who have, or wish to have, children of their own, and to those who are or wish to become teachers. What are the child’s nature and needs? How are they different from those of an adult? How can we best foster the child’s development so as to help him maximize his potential for productivity and happiness in life? Current research validates Montessori’s ideas. We believe that, on the whole, the philosophy of the child developed by Italian physician and teacher Maria Montessori, is most consistent with the Objectivist view of human nature, needs, and values.

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori, the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome Medical School, became a doctor in 1896. Her first post was in the university’s Psychiatric Clinic.

In that age, retarded children were considered a medical problem, rather than an educational one, and were often kept in hospitals for the insane. Montessori’s visits with children in Roman insane asylums prompted her to study the works of Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (1775-1838) and Edouard Seguin (1812-1880), two French-born pioneers in education for the mentally deficient. She went on to read all the major works on educational theory of the previous two centuries.

In 1899, Montessori became director of the State Orthophrenic School, where her work with the retarded was so successful that the majority of her students were able to pass the state education exams. While other people exclaimed over this phenomenal success, Montessori pondered its implication for normal children. If the mentally deficient could do as well on the exams as normal children, in what poor state must those normal children be! This reflection led her to devote her life to education.

Montessori opened her first Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) in 1907, applying to children of normal intelligence the methods and materials she had developed for deficient children. She also spent a great deal of time observing and meditating on what children did with her materials—what brought out their best learning and their greatest enthusiasm.

As a result of Montessori’s achievements at the Casa dei Bambini, her method spread rapidly. By 1915, over 100 Montessori schools had opened in America, and many more had opened in the rest of the world. In Switzerland, one of the most important 20th-century theorists in child development—Jean Piaget (1896-1980)—was heavily influenced by Montessori and her method. Piaget was director of the modified Montessori school in Geneva, where he did some of the observations for his first book, Language and Thought of the Child, and served as head of the Swiss Montessori society.

Maria Montessori, Her Life and Work, by E.M. Standing, is an interesting historical account told from the viewpoint of a devoted follower. A more recent and objective biography is Rita Kramer’s Maria Montessori.

The Montessori Method

Maria Montessori’s own works constitute the best source of information concerning her theories and methods. The Montessori Method, the first overview of her educational techniques, remains the best in many respects. Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook goes into the details of her philosophy, materials, and methods. The Discovery of the Child is a later detailed summarization of Montessori’s philosophy and method of teaching, with much discussion of the child’s nature and the best means of approaching the child with work. The Secret of Childhood is a history of what—and how—Montessori learned about the unique nature of children, the problems that can arise when the child’s nature is not properly nurtured, and the repercussions that proper and improper nurturing of the child have on society. This work is especially recommended for parents.

According to Maria Montessori, “A child’s work is to create the person she will become.” To carry out this self-construction, children have innate mental powers, but they must be free to use these powers. For this reason, a Montessori classroom provides freedom while maintaining an environment that encourages a sense of order and self-discipline. “Freedom in a structured environment” is the Montessori dictum that names this arrangement.

Like all thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition, Montessori recognized that the senses must be educated first in the development of the intellect. Consequently, she created a vast array of special learning materials from which concepts could be abstracted and through which they could be concretized. In recognition of the independent nature of the developing intellect, these materials are self-correcting—that is, from their use, the child discovers for himself whether he has the right answer. This feature of her materials encourages the child to be concerned with facts and truth, rather than with what adults say is right or wrong.

Also basic to Montessori’s philosophy is her belief in the “sensitive periods” of a child’s development: periods when the child seeks certain stimuli with immense intensity, and, consequently, can most easily master a particular learning skill. The teacher’s role is to recognize the sensitive periods in individual children and put the children in touch with the appropriate materials.

Montessori also identified stages of growth—which she called “Planes of Development”—that occur in approximately six-year intervals and that are further subdivided into two three-year segments. These planes of development are the basis for the three-year age groupings found in Montessori schools: ages 3 to 6, 6 to 9, 9 to 12, and 12 to 18.

From birth to age six, children are sensorial explorers, studying every aspect of their environment, language, and culture. Montessori’s The Absorbent Mind provides a detailed discussion of how the child’s mind and needs develop during this period.

From age six to twelve, children become reasoning explorers. They develop new powers of abstraction and imagination, using and applying their knowledge to further discover and expand their world. During this time, it is still essential that the child carry out activities in order to integrate acting and thinking. It is his own effort that gives him independence, and his own experience that brings him answers as to how and why things function as they do. Montessori’s The Montessori Elementary Materials discusses the materials and curriculum to be used for children during this period.

From Childhood to Adolescence, also by Montessori, outlines the changes children undergo in mentality and outlook as they grow from childhood to adolescence, and the nature and needs of the adolescent child. She also proposes a radical concept of schooling for the adolescent.

Valuable secondary works on the Montessori method include Elizabeth Hainstock’s Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Preschool Years, and Teaching Montessori in the Home: The School Years. Both give an abbreviated view of the philosophy and the method, as well as detailed instructions on how to make and use the materials. Paula Lilliard’s 1972 work, Montessori: A Modern Approach, reviews the history and nature of the Montessori philosophy, discussing how “current” it is in addressing modern educational concerns and what it has to offer the contemporary family.

Throughout her writing, Montessori combines keen observations and insights with a heroic view of the importance of the child’s work in self- development—work by which each man creates the best within him. Many writers and critics dislike Montessori’s romantic rhetoric, and admittedly her phraseology tends to the mystical. Nevertheless, we find her language refreshing and inspiring. As the following sentence illustrates, she always keeps in mind the glory and grandeur of human development:

“Humanity shows itself in all its intellectual splendor during this tender age as the sun shows itself at the dawn, and the flower in the first unfolding of the petals; and we must respect religiously, reverently, these first indications of individuality.”

The Montessori method always places its principles and activities in the broad context of the importance of human life and development, intelligence and free will. Indeed, one of the cornerstones of the Montessori method is the presentation of knowledge as an integrated whole, emphasizing conceptual relationships between different branches of learning, and the placement of knowledge in its historical context.

Dewey Versus Montessori

In American academic circles, Montessori is little known, except as a name from the past, and textbooks on educational theory therefore tend to discuss her method only in an historical context. Much of this learned ignorance can be traced to The Montessori System Examined, a small but highly influential book published in 1914 by Professor William Heard Kilpatrick. In his time, Kilpatrick was one of the most popular professors at Columbia University’s Teachers College, an institution with far-ranging influence among educational theorists and one of the main redoubts for John Dewey’s Progressive method of education.

Dewey and Montessori approached education from philosophically and psychologically different perspectives. Dewey’s concern was with fostering the imagination and the development of social relationships. He believed in developing the intellect late in childhood, for fear that it might stifle other aspects of development. By contrast, Montessori believed that development of the intellect was the only means by which the imagination and proper social relationships could arise. Her method focused on the early stimulation and sharpening of the senses, the development of independence in motor tasks and the care of the self, and the child’s naturally high motivation to learn about the world as a means of gaining mastery over himself and his environment.

Thus, behind Kilpatrick’s criticism of Montessori’s educational method lay a great deal of antagonism towards Montessori’s philosophy and psychology. Kilpatrick dismissed Montessori’s sensorial materials because they were based on what he considered to be an outdated theory of the faculties of the mind (Dewey was greatly influenced by early Behaviorism) and a too-early development of the intellect. Kilpatrick also criticized Montessori’s materials as too restrictive: because they have a definite outcome, he felt, they restrict the child’s imagination. Following Dewey’s collectivist view of man, and his central focus on the social development of the child, Kilpatrick also disliked Montessori’s decidedly individualistic view of the child.

Montessori Today

In the United States, the views of Dewey and Kilpatrick prevailed, and the name of Montessori was largely forgotten for several decades. Fortunately for recent generations of American children, a dissatisfied American mother, Nancy Rambusch, rediscovered Montessori in Europe during the 1950s. Rambusch began the “second-wave” Montessori schools in the United States, lectured widely on the Montessori method, and helped found the American Montessori Society. Over the past forty years, grass-roots interest has spurred a phenomenal growth of Montessori schools in America, but the movement is not generally recognized or promoted in university education departments.

The Montessori Controversy and Montessori Schools in America, both by John Chattin-McNichols, discuss research on the relationship of the method to historical and current educational theories; and controversies that have arisen between the Montessori movement and academic theorists, and also within the Montessori movement.

Interestingly, Montessori Schools in America includes Beatrice Hessen’s article on the Montessori method, originally published in The Objectivist. As this Study Guide indicates, a link between Objectivism and the Montessori method of education is a promising connection for both movements. Montessori’s methods encourage children to be at home in a free society, such as Objectivists would like to establish. Respect for the person, property, and ideas of others are primary values in the Montessori classroom, as are respectful cooperation and personal responsibility. Children are required to care for the materials they use and the environment of the classroom; they are encouraged to work on projects cooperatively, but only when they wish to do so. At a deeper level, Objectivism’s epistemological and ethical ideas offer a rich theoretical soil in which Montessori’s methods can thrive and perhaps even develop further.

Montessori Training

In the United States at present, training for teachers is offered through the Association Montessori Internationale/USA, an arm of Maria Montessori’s original training organization; and through the American Montessori Society, founded by Nancy Rambusch. Many independent organizations also offer training. The North American Montessori Teachers Association is a center of research and information. Further information can be obtained from these organizations at the following addresses: